I do like your idea. There are sites that list average read time of articles and I don't see why this could not be implemented into Steemit. There would need to be an algorithm designed to figure out a fast readers time in comparison to the average to account for them.

Then you would have those that would somehow figure out how to manipulate the system by decreasing their read time in some artificial way. Maybe a minimum time to have the article open would need to be depending on the average read time per article.

It would be interesting to see bots having to open an article for a minimum amount of time to be able to automatically upvote it.

The other day I saw a post of a prominent Steemian that continuously makes the trending page because of bot upvotes. The article was worth a few hundred bucks. It was literally 10 words and a link to another article. That's manipulation of the system to the nth degree.

That specific example garnered this reaction from me...